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" S HE is madonna in an art as wild and young as her sweet eyes," Vachel Lindsay wrote of Mae Mdrsh, who died on Tuesday of last week. She is the heroine of D. \V. Griffith's "Intolerance," which ca111e out In 1916 and which will have its an- nual showing at the Museu111 of Mod- ern .A.rt on February 24th. "Intoler- " . f h ance 1S one 0 t e two or three 1110St in- fluential 1110vies ever 111ade, and I think it is also th e grea test. Yet many of those who are interested in 1110 vie s ha ve never seen it. "The Birth of a Na- tion," which Griffith brought out in 1915 (with Mae Marsh as the little sister who throws herself off a cliff through "the opal gates of death" ), still draws audiences, because of its scandalous success. But those who see it projected at the wrong speed, so I . b " fl ' k " d . t lat It eC0111es a IC, an 1n 111utI- lated form-cut and in bLtck-dnJ- white or faded color-an..- not likely to develop enough interest in Griffith's art to go to see his other fi1111S. "In- tolerance" was a C0l11111ercial failure in 1 916, and it has never had 111 uch popu- lar reputation. After thp reactions to "The Birth of a Nation," Griffith was so shocked that people could thInk he was anti-Negro that he d cided to ex- pand S0111e 111aterial he had been working on and nlake it an attack on bigotry th roughout the clges. "In toler- ance" was in tended to be vIrtuous and uplifting. It turned out to be a great, desperate, innovative, ruinous fìlrn- perhaps the classic exa111ple of what later ca111e to be known as ciné1na rnaudit. Griffith had alreddy, in the OVer four hundred 1110vies he had 111elde-frool the one-reelers on up to "The Birth of a 1\a6on"-founded the art of screen narrative; now he wanted to tr, S0I11e- thing nlore than simply telling the story of bigot I"} in hIstorical sequence. He had developed crosscutting in his earlier filolS, using discontinuit} dS Dickens did in his novels. In "Intolerance," he atte111pted to tell four storie" taking place in different historical periods, crosscutting back and forth to ancient Babylon, sixteenth-century France, the [nod ern An1erican Slll111S, and Cellvar}. He was living in an era of experi111ents with ti111e in the other arts, and although he worked in a popular n1cdilll11, the old dra111atic concepts of tÎ1ne and unit) see111ed too IÎ1nitlng; in his own WelY he attelTIpted what Pound and Eliot, Proust and Virgulla \Voolf and Joyce were also atte111p6ng, and what he did in movies 111ay have in- fl uenced literar) for111 as 111uch .t" they did. He certainl) infl uenced thel11. The events of "Intolerance" were, he said, set fortll "as they 111igh t flash across a 111ind seek- ing to parallel the life of the different ages." It doesn't work "Intoler- ance" al1110st hecom es a fil111 SYl11phony, but foul stories intercut and rush- ing toward si111ultaneous cli111axes is, a t a basic level, too naïve a con- ception to be anything 1110re than four 111elodra111as told at once. The subtitJes of "Intolerance" state the the111e 1110re than the action shows it, and the four parallel 8tories were probably just too 111 uch and too bewildering for audiences. Also, the idealistic attack on hypocrisy, cruelt}, and persecution [nay have see111ed un- c0111fortably pacifistic in 1 916. No si111ple fra111ework could con- tain the richness of what Griffith tried to do in this 111ovie. He tried to force his stories together, and pushed the111 into ridiculous patterns to illustrate his the111C But his excitel11ent-his 111ad- ness-binds together what his arbItrar- ily i111posed the111e does not. "Into]er- ance" is like an enorl110US, extravagantly printed co]]ection of fairy tales. The book is too thick to handle, too richly i111agineltive to take in, yet a child who loves stories will know that this is the tl easure of treasures. The 1110vie is the greatest extravaganza and the greatest fol1 in lTIovie histor}, an epic celebra- tion of the potentialities of the new mediull1-lyrical, passionate, and gran- dIose. Noone will ever agaIn be able to 111.:tke ldst-111inute rescues so suspenseful, so beautiful, or so absurd. [n mOVIes, a 111asterpiece is of course a folly. "In- tolerance" is charged with visionary excite111ent about the power of 1110vies to C0111bine 111usic, dance, narrative, dl amLl, painting, and photography-to do dlone what an the other arts to- gether hdd done. }\.nd to do what they had failed to. Griffith's drea111 was not only to reach the vast audience hut to express it, to 111ake of the young 1110vie art a true delTIocratic at t. Griffith's 1110vies are great not be-